Quantum Physicists from Quantinuum and Chubu University Team on Quantum AI and Cognition Research

Oxford and Kasugai, Japan, August 23, 2023 – Quantum computing company Quantinuum and Chubu University in Japan have announced a partnership, co-led by Professors Bob Coecke and Masanao Ozawa. Their goals is to establish an interdisciplinary team to explore quantum computational linguistics and cognition for building future applications in quantum AI.

Professor Coecke, Quantinuum’s chief scientist, has for two decades research in categorical quantum mechanics and quantum computational linguistics, first at Oxford University, now at Quantinuum. Professor Ozawa, a pioneer in quantum information and foundations, in 2003 derived a new measurement-disturbance relation (Ozawa’s Inequality) that corrects the “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle”, and in 2012 succeeded in its experimental verification. He has since led research into quantum operational approach to cognitive psychology.

The planned multi-year project will focus on developing compositional models for cognition with potential applications for taking advantage of the latest generation of quantum computers.

Founder and Chief Product Officer of Quantinuum, Ilyas Khan said, “The pioneering work of Professors Ozawa and Coecke reveals the enormous and increasingly relevant potential of quantum computing to truly revolutionize artificial intelligence. Both linguistics and cognition remain intractable to classical computing simulations, but both are amenable to being fully and responsibly exploited by quantum computing. Quantinuum supports transformative work at every stage in the development of quantum computers and the applications and algorithms that use them. Fields like AI have long been synonymous with advances in quantum computing and Quantinuum has established itself as the world-leader in the application of quantum computing to areas related to cognition, such as quantum natural language processing and quantum machine learning.”

This partnership builds on earlier work by Coecke and Ozawa that there are parallels between quantum and cognitive systems, exploring the application of the mathematical structures of quantum theory to observed features of human language and cognition. It is hoped that this work may provide explanations for a range of intractable problems, such as the role of context in generating meaning in text, or cognitive phenomena such as the “question order effect”.